He's always been the only candidate who gets the money of 2012 and the madness of the GOP, but will that be enough?
(Illustration by DonkeyHotey viaFlickr/Special to The Politics Blog)

I am supposed to write now about how Willard Romney, the only presidential candidate in history to run as his own animatronic double, got his swerve on, his mojo back, and his engorged pen... no, wait, let me start again. I am supposed to write about how Willard Romney, a man with the charisma of grass seed and the political principles of a moray eel, became a newly formidable candidate after his thumping by Newt Gingrich among the holy-rolling swamp-runners in South Carolina. I read in yesterday's New York Times that, after failing the ultimate test of his Gooberhood, Willard fled to one of his several Fortresses of Solitude, only to emerge in Florida as a lean, mean pompadoured war beast:

It was a call to arms employing all the visible and invisible tactics of political warfare.

(Ed. Note: Did they paint their faces blue and eat the still-beating hearts out of live elk?)

David Kochel, an adviser who arrived here from Iowa to oversee the pressure campaign, described the strategy as "let's go rush the quarterback."

(Ed. Note: Mitt Romney, the Mormon Justin Tuck.)

A team of some of the most fearsome researchers in the business, led by Mr. Romney's campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, spent days dispensing negative information about Mr. Gingrich, much of it finding its way to the influential Drudge Report, which often serves as a guide for conservative talk radio and television assignment editors and to which Mr. Rhoades has close ties.

(Ed. Note: Do not approach Mr. Rhoades at any time without first donning a HazMat suit.)

With the Florida primary two days away, Mr. Gingrich is now facing the full capabilities of a Romney team that was built for battle...

(Ed. Note: Oh, god save us, they're serious. FREEEEEDOMMMMMMMMMM!!!!)

Okay, so it does look like Willard is once again moving toward capturing a nomination that he never was going to lose in the first place, so that is worthy of examination. It may take a while, though.

The next two weeks are going to be the test. Not so much of the relative strengths or the relative electability or (God help us) the relative merits of the remaining four Republican candidates for president but, rather, of exactly how much we as a country intend to be fooled by clumsy dumbshow, and of exactly how firmly our elite media will dedicate itself once again to the task of draping togas over gibbering grifters, obvious charlatans, and transparent mountebanks. There has been made an heroic effort all year to ignore the two most obvious stories of the campaign: a) the deforming power of corporate money in our politics, especially in the wake of the Citizens United decision, and b) that, as evidenced by the field of candidates it coughed up to oppose a still very vulnerable incumbent president, the Republican party, root and branch, is now completely barking mad.

Consider the various "frontrunners" we've gone through. Michele Bachmann was a frontrunner after the Iowa Straw Poll because she proved herself to be the best one at off-loading elderly white people from buses. (This qualifies her to be marketing director of a reservation casino, but not much else). Herman Cain was a frontrunner for a while because everybody chose not to notice what a crackpot he is. The idea that the haunts of ancient sexytime brought him down, and not the fact that his "bold ideas" would've turned this country into Albania with baseball, is indication enough of how shabbily rigged the puppet show is this time around. Sometime in the middle of last fall, it became impolite to point out that the Republican party was offering to the nation the most obviously unqualified, nakedly prevaricating, and altogether stumble-brained clown college since the last Ringling Brother died.

(And consider also the almost endless roster of Pundit Dreamsicles who declined to run. Chris Christie. Mitch Daniels. Paul Ryan. A New Jersey blowhard. George Bush's budget director. And a zombie-eyed granny-starver whose Big Idea is currently polling somewhere in the vicinity of Little America. Any story mentioning that there didn't seem to be a bottom to the barrel of actual candidates had to mention the real superstars who were sulking offstage. And this was the real A-team? There's a problem here in the family that nobody's talking about.)

Instead, we got stories questioning how Rick Perry might "turn it around," and the people writing them had to work really hard to pretend that, "Learn freaking English, cowboy." wasn't the most obvious answer. We got endless speculation about what The Base was thinking, without any acknowledgement that The Base was the whole damn problem. If it were not, then Willard Romney wouldn't have had to spend the last two years making himself look so ridiculous. Meanwhile, those two most basic stories were lost amid a cacophony of absurd talking points and luxuriously financed bullshit on the airwaves. Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina came and went, and were declared inconclusive because Gingrich was able to race-bait a campaign to a victory in that particular tactic's home office, and now Florida is going to be hailed as a breakthrough because the obvious nominee has toughened himself up with a new posse drawn from the Bloods of the Heritage Foundation and the Crips of the American Enterprise Institute. Gang truce!

And still, those two stories are the only ones that matter. Willard Romney has made a great effort over the past two days, butching himself up in spiked shoulder pads and hollering for mead and slave women, in order to "get back" what he'd never truly lost in the first place. Yes, he looked like a jackass in South Carolina. In any sane political party, he'd be allowed to brag about that. Now, though, he's back running in a state that he can carpet-bomb with money, which he will use to explain again how he's the only one of this troupe of buffoons who even halfway looks like a president. He's outspent Newt Gingrich five-to-one in a state where all campaigning is done tarmac-to-tarmac. He's always been the candidate best suited to take advantage of the twisted new landscape of campaign finance, and to take advantage of the fact the most of his party is out of its mind. He's always been the only one of them operating within the fundamentally overlooked twin realities of this campaign.

The test comes afterwards, though. I fear we're now in for a fearsome period of reality-detached spin. The Republican "Establishment" — although having bottom-feeding slugs like Matt Drudge, indicted crooks like Tom DeLay, superannuated media harpies like Ann Coulter, and Bob Dole, The Vengeful Undead, for your "establishment" illustrates another story about Republicans that's worth a second look, but won't get it — has lined up impressively behind Willard Romney, who has abnegated himself impressively enough just to make that happen.

Do we see a Romney victory as a triumph of tactics, as a victory for those tough-as-nails Ostrogoths who hired on from such fallen juggernauts as the Bachmann campaign? Or do we understand that there is nothing important about Willard Romney as a candidate that has changed at all. He is still an unprincipled opportunist, incapable of telling the truth about his own record, and utterly without conscience when it comes to lying about someone else. Almost everything he says about the incumbent president is just as much a lie as it was when he said it in Iowa, or in New Hampshire, or in South Carolina, or 10 goddamn minutes ago. He still so represents the kind of capitalism that nearly wrecked this country that Thomas Nast might come back from the dead just to draw "GREED" with his face. All of this was true a week ago. All of this will be true next week. And next month. And in November, when the threadbare puppet theater finally comes down.